The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

By Jonathan Freedland

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award · New York Times Bestseller

"A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information—and misinformation. Is it possible to stop mass murder by telling the truth?" — Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

A complex hero. A forgotten story. The first witness to reveal the full truth of the Holocaust . . .

Award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Jonathan Freedland tells the astonishing true story of Rudolf Vrba, the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world of a truth too few were willing to hear.

In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became one of the very first Jews to escape from Auschwitz and make his way to freedom—among only a tiny handful who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world—and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them. Against all odds, Vrba and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen—a forensically detailed report that eventually reached Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Pope.

And yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba had risked everything to deliver. Though Vrba helped save two hundred thousand Jewish lives, he never stopped believing it could have been so many more.

This is the story of a brilliant yet troubled man—a gifted “escape artist” who, even as a teenager, understood that the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death. Rudolf Vrba deserves to take his place alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, and Primo Levi as one of the handful of individuals whose stories define our understanding of the Holocaust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063112377

Jonathan Freedland

Journalist and broadcaster Jonathan Freedland is a weekly columnist for the Guardian, where he edits the paper’s op-ed pages and chairs its Editorial Board. He was previously the Guardian’s Washington correspondent. In 2014 he won the George Orwell Prize for Journalism. He lives in London with his wife and their two children. @Freedland.

Book preview

Maps

Map drawn by Nicky Barneby, Barneby Ltd

Map drawn by Nicky Barneby, Barneby Ltd

Map of Auschwitz I and labels on map of Auschwitz II adapted from maps by Nikola Zimring, Rudolf Vrba Archives, LLC 2018, used with permission.

Map of Auschwitz I and labels on map of Auschwitz II adapted from maps by Nikola Zimring, Rudolf Vrba Archives, LLC 2018, used with permission.

Dedication

For my father, Michael Freedland, 1934–2018

His memory is a blessing.

Contents

Cover

Maps

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Prologue

Part I: The Preparations

1.Star

2.Five Hundred Reichsmarks

3.Deported

4.Majdanek

Part II: The Camp

5.We Were Slaves

6.Kanada

7.The Final Solution

8.Big Business

9.The Ramp

10.The Memory Man

11.Birkenau

12.‘It Has Been Wonderful’

Part III: The Escape

13.Escape Was Lunacy

14.Russian Lessons

15.The Hideout

16.Let My People Go

17.Underground

18.On the Run

19.Crossing the Border

Part IV: The Report

20.In Black and White

21.Men of God

22.What Can I Do?

23.London Has Been Informed

24.Hungarian Salami

Part V: The Shadow

25.A Wedding with Guns

26.A New Nation, a New England

27.Canada

28.I Know a Way Out

29.Flowers of Emptiness

30.Too Many to Count

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Photo Section

Postscript

About the Author

Also by Jonathan Freedland

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

WHEN I WAS nineteen years old, I went to the Curzon cinema in Mayfair in London to see the nine-hour epic documentary Shoah. It was not a normal movie-going experience. Partly it was the length of the film; partly it was the audience. In the room were survivors of the Holocaust. My friend made the mistake of bringing popcorn, but he did not get very far with it. He had barely begun chomping when a woman from a nearby row leaned over and slapped him, hard, on the thigh. In an accent thick with the sound and memories of pre-war Europe, she said: ‘Have you no respect?’

The film left a deep mark, but one of the interviewees stayed with me more than any other. His name was Rudolf Vrba. In the film, he is shown testifying to the greatest horrors in human history, horrors he had witnessed first hand, horrors he had survived. Very briefly he mentions something extraordinary, a fact which made him all but unique among Holocaust survivors. Aged nineteen, no older than I was as I watched the film, he had escaped from Auschwitz.

I never forgot his name or his face, even though, over the decades, I would be struck how few others had ever heard of him. And then, some thirty years after that night in the cinema in 1986, I found myself returning to Rudolf Vrba. We were living in the age of post-truth and fake news, when the truth itself was under assault – and I thought once more of the man who had been ready to risk everything so that the world might know of a terrible truth hidden under a mountain of lies.

I began to look into the life of Rudolf Vrba, finding the handful of people still alive who had known him or worked with him or loved him. It turned out that his teenage sweetheart and first wife, Gerta, was living alone, aged ninety-three, in Muswell Hill in north London. Over half a dozen summer afternoons in the plague year of 2020, she and I sat in her garden and talked of a young man, then called Walter Rosenberg, and the world they had both known. She handed me a red suitcase packed with Rudi’s letters, some telling of almost unbearable personal pain. A matter of days after our last conversation, once Gerta had told me the story in full, I got a phone call from her family, letting me know that she had passed away.

Rudi’s second wife and widow, Robin, was in New York. She and I talked for hour after hour too, as she filled in the story of the man Rudolf Vrba became, the memories he had entrusted to her, the love they had shared. What soon became clear as I listened, and as I immersed myself in the official documents, testimonies, memoirs, letters, contemporary reports and historical accounts on which this book is based, was that this was more than the true story of an unprecedented escape. It was also the story of how history can change a life, even down the generations; how the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death; and how people can refuse to believe in the possibility of their own imminent destruction, even, perhaps especially, when that destruction is certain. Those notions were stark and vivid in the Europe of the 1940s. But they seemed to have a new, fearful resonance in our own time.

I also came to realise that this is a story of how human beings can be pushed to the outer limits, and yet still somehow endure; how those who have witnessed so much death can nevertheless retain their capacity, their lust, for life; and how the actions of one individual, even a teenage boy, can bend the arc of history, if not towards justice then towards something like hope.

I left the cinema that night convinced that the name of Rudolf Vrba deserved to stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi, in the first rank of stories that define the Shoah. That day may never come. But maybe, through this book, Rudolf Vrba might perform one last act of escape: perhaps he might escape our forgetfulness, and be remembered.

Prologue

7 April 1944

AFTER DAYS OF delay, weeks of obsessive preparation, months of watching the failed attempts of others and two years of seeing the depths to which human beings could sink, the moment had finally come. It was time to escape.

The two other prisoners were already there, at the designated spot. Wordlessly, they gave the nod: do it now. Walter and Fred did not hesitate. They climbed on top of the timbers, found the opening and, one after the other, they dropped inside. A second later, their comrades moved the planks into place above their heads. One of them whispered, ‘Bon voyage.’ And then all was dark and silent.

Without delay, Walter set to work. He pulled out the machorka, the cheap, Soviet tobacco he had been told about, a batch that had been prepared as instructed: soaked in petrol and dried. Slowly, he began to wedge it into the cracks between the wooden boards, sometimes blowing on it gently, puffing it into place, hoping against hope that the Soviet prisoner of war who had taught him the trick was right, that the scent would be repellent to dogs. Not that they were relying solely on Walter’s handiwork. They had already made sure that the ground around the hideout was liberally sprinkled with the treated tobacco, so that the canine SS would not even draw near. If the Red Army man’s confidence was well-founded, Walter and Fred should be able to crouch in this hole beneath the woodpile, silent and undisturbed, for exactly as long as they needed: three days and three nights.

Walter stared at the phosphorescent hands of his watch. Time was crawling. He wanted to stand up, to stretch, but he could do no such thing. His arms and legs were cramping up, but he knew he would have to endure that and endure it in silence. It was too risky to talk. At one point, Walter felt Fred, who was six years older than him, take his hand and squeeze it. Walter was nineteen years old.

What was that? The sound of footsteps – and they were getting closer. Was this the end for Walter and Fred, so soon after they had begun? Reflexively, each man reached for his razor blade. They were clear on this point: they might be caught, but they would not let themselves be interrogated. They would end it in this hole in the ground; they would turn this hideout into a burial pit.

Not that the SS would leave them here. They would drag their dead bodies back to the camp. They would prop them up on spades or hang them from the gallows, a sign of warning placed around their necks, the same performance that followed every other failed escape. They would make trophies of their corpses.

Walter’s nerves seemed to be tightening with each passing second. This pit they were in was so small. But then the footsteps, if that was what they were, faded away.

At 6 p.m. that Friday night it came, the shriek of the siren. It was a howl to make the air vibrate and the blood freeze in your veins, a thousand wolf packs baying in unison. The pair had heard it enough times, a sound so piercing even the SS men would put their fingers in their ears. The noise was appalling, but every inmate welcomed it: it meant that at least one of their number had been found missing from the evening roll call – and that, perhaps, a prisoner had escaped Auschwitz.

That was their cue. Fred and Walter moved out of the main space, which had been built to hold four, and wriggled into the side branch, a kind of passageway, that could accommodate only two. It was intended to be an extra layer of protection: a hiding place within the hiding place. The pair squeezed in and lay dead still, side by side. For Walter, it was almost a relief. Now at last the waiting was over; battle was joined. Each man had tied a strip of flannel across his mouth, so that he would not betray himself – and the other – with a cough. The only movement came from the luminous hands of the watch.

They would not see it, but they knew what the siren would bring. And soon enough they could hear it: the manhunt under way. The pounding of close on 2,000 pairs of jackboots, tramping across the ground, the senior men alternately swearing and barking orders – screaming them, because, given what had happened a couple of days earlier, another escape was a humiliation – the dogs slavering as they rooted out any sign of frail, quivering human life, 200 of them, trained and primed for this very purpose. The SS would search every ridge and every hollow; they would comb every bush, examine every ditch and shine a light into every trench of the sprawling metropolis of death that was Auschwitz. The search had begun and it would not let up for three days.

Fred and Walter could be precise about that because the Nazis had a security protocol from which they never deviated. This outer part of the camp, where prisoners laboured as slaves, was guarded only during the daylight hours when the inmates were working. No need to watch over it at night, when every last prisoner was herded back inside the inner camp, with its double lines of electrified wire fences. There was only one exception to that rule. If an inmate was missing, presumed to have attempted an escape, the SS kept up the outer ring of armed sentry posts, every watchtower occupied by a man with a machine gun.

It would stay like that for seventy-two hours, while the SS searched. After that, they would conclude that the escapee, or escapees, had got away: from then on, it would be the responsibility of the Gestapo to scour the wider region and find them. Those guarding the outer cordon would be ordered to withdraw, leaving it unmanned. Which meant there was a gap in the Nazi defences. Not a literal gap, but a loophole. If a prisoner could somehow hide in the outer area during those three days and nights after the alarm had been sounded, even as the SS and their dogs strove to sniff them out, then he would emerge on the fourth night into an outer camp that was unguarded. He could escape.

Walter heard a familiar voice. That murderous drunk, Unterscharführer Buntrock, was close by, giving orders to some luckless underlings. ‘Look behind those planks,’ he was saying. ‘Use your heads!’

Fred and Walter braced themselves. The SS men got nearer. Now they could hear boots climbing on to the boards overhead, sending a fine sprinkling of dirt down into the cavity beneath. The pursuers were so close, Walter could hear the heaviness of their breath.

Next came the dogs, scratching at the wood, snuffling and sniffing, shifting from plank to plank, their panting audible through the timber walls and ceiling. Had the Soviet prisoner been wrong about his special brew of tobacco? Or had Walter misunderstood his instructions? Why had these animals not been driven away by the smell?

This time Walter reached for his knife rather than his razor; he wanted a weapon to use against others rather than himself. He felt the throb of his heart.

But, miraculously, the moment passed. The SS men and their dogs grew more distant. Inside their tiny double coffin of a hiding place, Fred and Walter allowed themselves the comfort of a smile.

The relief never lasted long. All through the evening and into that first night, the sounds of footsteps and barking dogs would come nearer, then grow distant; rising and falling, louder then softer, then louder again, as the searchers kept returning to this same corner of the camp. Walter liked to think he could sense frustration in the voices of the SS men as they probed the same ground, again and again. He would hear them cursing as they gave a second and then a third poke to a pile of timbers or roof tiles, sweeping an area they had already swept twice before.

Both of them were desperate to flex or stretch, but hardly dared. Walter longed to warm his ice-cold hands and feet, but even the slightest movement saw his whole body gripped with searing cramp. If one of them dozed, the other would remain taut with tension, listening for any hint of movement nearby. Even sleep brought no rest, just nightmares of an endless present, stuck in this subterranean box: hellish below ground, worse still above.

They heard the morning shift begin, the familiar sounds of forced labour. This area was a construction site, and it soon echoed to the banging of timber, the clanking of metal, the barking of dogs and the shouting of the SS and their henchmen. Fred and Walter reckoned that the risk that their woodpile would be disturbed by slave workers was minimal – these planks were not earmarked for use any time soon – but they could hardly relax. Perhaps ten hours passed before the noise quieted and the Kommando marched back to barracks.

Throughout, the two men kept still, knowing that back in the inner camp the SS would be searching every hut, store, washroom, latrine and shed, turning every barrack building upside down. Naturally there was a system: the method was to search in a series of ever decreasing circles, with the sniffer dogs in the middle of the pack, closing in on their prey. And once they got to the centre of the smallest circle, they would start all over again.

The Nazis came so close, so often, Walter considered it a wonder he and Fred had not been discovered hours ago. Fred saw it differently. ‘Stupid bastards!’ he said when it was safe to break the silence. Perhaps it was bravado. Twenty-four hours in, Fred was no more able to eat or drink than Walter. They had stashed some provisions in this narrow passage: several pounds of bread, carefully rationed into chunks, as well as some margarine and a bottle filled with cold coffee. But, such were their nerves, neither had the stomach to touch a thing.

Somehow the hours dragged their way through Saturday to reach Sunday. Now the pair decided to take a chance. For the first time since the sirens sounded, they emerged from the side cavity into the relative expanse of the bunker itself. Even though Walter had tried to fill the gaps in the wall and the ceiling with the treated tobacco, he had not plugged them all: some of the frosty morning mist seeped through.

They were so stiff from lying still. Fred could not move his right arm and he had lost all feeling in his fingers. Walter massaged his companion’s shoulder to get the blood circulating. They did not linger in the larger space for long.

The SS kept up the search. Fred and Walter froze as they heard two men, Germans, a matter of yards away. It was in the early afternoon, and they could pick up every word.

‘They can’t have got away,’ said one. ‘They must be still in the camp.’

The Germans began speculating about Fred and Walter’s likely hiding places. One was clearly pointing to something. ‘How about that pile of wood?’

Walter and Fred did not move.

‘Do you think they might be hiding under there?’ the second voice said. ‘Maybe they built themselves a little alcove.’

The first one thought it unlikely. After all, he mused out loud, and not inaccurately: ‘The dogs have been over it a dozen times.’ Unless, that is, the missing Jews had found some ingenious way to put the dogs off the scent.

Then some words of resolve, a declaration that it was ‘worth trying’ and the sound of two men scrambling to get nearer.

Once more, Walter grabbed his knife. Fred did the same.

The two Germans climbed on top of the woodpile, which they proceeded to dismantle, board by board. They took off the first layer, then the second, then, with some effort, the third and fourth.

If it had come ten seconds later, it would have been too late. Not for the first time, indeed this may have been the eighth or ninth time, Walter’s life was saved by a random moment of good luck, in this case one that could not have been more perfectly timed.

Far off there was a sudden commotion, the voices distant but excited. Fred and Walter could hear the men just above them pause, their ears seemingly cocked to pick up what was happening. A second passed. Then another. Finally, one of the pair said, ‘They’ve got them! C’mon . . . Hurry.’ And, down below, Fred and Walter heard their would-be discoverers scramble away.

Sunday night passed into Monday morning. Now it was a countdown, Walter staring at the hands of his watch, knowing that if they could hold out just a little longer . . .

The morning shift returned, bringing with it the same din, the same barking, both human and animal, for another ten hours, each minute passing at the same agonising pace.

Eventually the Kommando returned to barracks. The three days were nearly up.

At 6.30 p.m., Walter and Fred finally heard the sound they had longed for. Announced loudly, it rang out: Postenkette abziehen! Postenkette abziehen! It was the order to take down the grosse Postenkette, the outer chain of sentry posts, shouted from one watchtower to the next and then the next, circling the entire perimeter, becoming louder when it got nearer, fading as it shifted further away, before it finally completed a full circuit. To Fred and Walter, those words, bellowed out by the men who had enslaved them and murdered hundreds of thousands of their people, sounded like the sweetest music. It was an admission of defeat by the SS, recognition that they had failed to recapture the two prisoners they had lost.

As SS protocol demanded, the outer ring of watchtowers was vacated, the cordon shrunk to lock in only the inner camp. Walter could hear the SS guards returning to the smaller loop of sentry towers. This was the great flaw in the Auschwitz system, the gap through which he and Fred had long planned to make their escape.

They were sorely tempted to rush, but they restrained themselves. First they had to emerge from the side cavity. For Walter, even inching forward sent a sharp pain shooting through his arms, legs, trunk and neck. His muscles were stiff and cold, his first movements jerky and uncertain, as if his body needed to relearn basic motor function. It took time for both of them, but finally they were in the main pit. They squatted and stretched, rotating their wrists and feet; they hugged each other in the darkness.

Now they took a deep breath and pressed their palms against the roof, trying to give the bottom board a push. But it would not move. They tried another spot on the ceiling. Still it would not budge. Was this to be the fatal flaw in their plan? Had they accidentally sealed themselves into their own tomb? It was the one thing they had not practised or even thought about. They had assumed that, if you could pile a plank on, you could take it off. But lifting boards is easy from above, when you can remove one at a time. Not so from below, when the weight of the entire stack is pressing down.

Shoving in tandem, grunting with pain, they managed to lift one of the bottom planks no more than an inch. But it was enough to give them purchase. Now they could get hold of it, just enough to shove it sideways. Fred turned to Walter with a smile. Thank God for those Germans who nearly found us, he whispered. ‘If they hadn’t moved those planks, we’d have been trapped.’

It had taken longer than either man had imagined, but finally there was an opening in what had been the roof of their home since Friday. There was a glimpse of the moonlit sky.

They summoned their strength again, shifting and shoving the boards until they could, with excruciating effort, haul themselves up and out. At last, they had done it. They were out of that hole in the ground.

But they were not yet out of the camp. There was still so much ground to cover if they were to become two of the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz and stay out. Even so, for the teenage Walter Rosenberg, it was an exhilarating feeling – but not a wholly new one. Because this was not his first escape. And it would not be his last.

Part I

The Preparations

1

Star

FROM THE START he knew he was special. He was not yet Rudolf Vrba, that would come later. His name was Walter Rosenberg and he had only to look into his mother’s eyes to know he was a one-off. Ilona Rosenberg had waited so long for him, desperate for his arrival. She was already a stepmother – her husband, Elias, came with three children from a previous marriage – but that was not the same as holding a baby of her own. For ten years, she had yearned for a child; the doctors told her she should stop hoping. So when Walter arrived on 11 September 1924, she greeted him like a miracle.

She doted on him, as did his half-siblings, two brothers and a sister, all of them more than a decade older, with Sammy and Fanci in particular more like an uncle and aunt than a brother and sister. The object of the kind of attention usually reserved for an only child, little Walter was precociously clever. He was four or five when Fanci, keen to meet up with her boyfriend, would drop Walter off at the one-room schoolhouse where her friend worked, so that someone other than her could keep an eye on him. He was meant to play or crayon in a corner, but she would return to find the teacher pointing to Walter Rosenberg as an example to be followed by the other children, some of them twice his age.

‘Look how well Walter is doing his work,’ she would say. He was not much older when his family would find him quietly turning the pages of a newspaper.

He was born in Topol’čany in the west of Slovakia, but close to the middle of the new land of Czechoslovakia that had been created just six years earlier. Before long, the family had sold up and headed to the far east of the country, edging close to Ukraine – to Jaklovce, a speck on the map so forgettable trains would pass through without ever stopping. They could not stop: there was no station, not even a platform. So Walter’s father, the owner of a local sawmill, took it into his head to build a platform and modest waiting area – a structure which, to Walter’s delight, doubled as the family’s sukkah during the autumn week when Jews are commanded to demonstrate their faith in the Almighty by eating their meals in temporary huts, exposed to the heavens.

The young Walter enjoyed life in the country. The family kept chickens, with pride of place given to an egg-laying hen. When the parents noticed that eggs were going missing, Fanci was ordered to keep watch: perhaps a fox was raiding the henhouse. One morning Fanci discovered the culprit and it was an unlikely predator: her little brother was breaking into the coop, stealing the eggs and eating them raw.

The Rosenbergs did not stay in the village long. Elias died when Walter was four years old, so Ilona headed back west, where the family had roots. Now she needed to make her own living. She went out on the road, a travelling saleswoman, supplying or altering the lingerie and underwear she made herself. But it was hardly the ideal set-up for raising a young child. She once left Walter with a friend, what Ilona would have called ‘a kept woman’. Angry with a patron who had discarded her, the woman bribed Walter to pretend that he was the couple’s love child, as she paraded around town loudly complaining about, and naming, the terrible man who had abandoned her and this darling little boy. Walter was rewarded for his performance with a trip to the bakery and whatever cake he fancied.

After that, Ilona decided that her son should live with his grandparents in Nitra. It worked out well. Walter soon formed a strong bond with his grandfather, who raised him in the customs of strictly orthodox Judaism. Occasionally, he might run an errand that took him to the home of the town’s much respected rabbi, and on Fridays Walter would follow his grandpa as he and all the other men headed to the river, using it as a mikva: submerging their bodies in the water, making of it a ritual bath where Jews cleanse themselves in preparation for the sabbath.

Walter liked tradition and he loved his grandparents: he was happy. The only cloud in the sky was a variant of sibling rivalry with his Viennese cousin Max, who was a couple of years older than him. Walter knew his grandfather took pride in his achievements in school, but he suspected that the old man liked Max more.

After his grandmother had a fall, and Walter’s grandfather decided he could no longer bring up the young boy alone, Walter was despatched to a Jewish orphanage in Bratislava. There, he impressed his teachers once more with his studiousness – asked to name his hobbies, he would say languages and reading, though he did make time to play football – and the headmaster suggested to Ilona that she should enrol her son in one of the city’s elite high schools. It would mean establishing a permanent residence in Bratislava, and hiring a young woman to act as Walter’s guardian while she remained on the road, but if the best was available to her boy, Ilona was determined he should have it.

When the time came to pose for a class photograph in the autumn of 1935, the outline of the man to come was visible. Just eleven years old, he may have looked a little nervous but he already had presence. His dark hair swept over to one side, and with the thick, dark eyebrows that would accompany him for life, he sat straight-backed, regarding the lens with intensity. The other boys did as they were told and posed with their arms folded. But not Walter.

He was still wearing tzitzit, the traditional fringed vest of the devout Jewish male, but his mother had made a cummerbund for him, to keep the tassels hidden. The payos, or sidecurls, which Walter would have worn in Nitra, were gone. For the first time, he was free to make his own religious decisions, without the influence of either his grandfather or the orphanage. One afternoon, strolling the streets of Bratislava with some lunch money in his pocket, he decided to put God to the test: he went into a restaurant and ordered pork. He took the first bite and waited for the bolt of lightning to strike. When it did not come, he made up his mind – and made the break.

Pupils at the gymnasium were given a choice of religious instruction: Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish or none. Walter chose none. On his identity papers, in the space set aside for nationality, he could have entered the word ‘Jewish’ but instead chose ‘Czechoslovak’. At school, he was now learning not only German but High German. (He had struck a deal with an émigré pupil: each boy would give the other advanced lessons in his native tongue.) In the class picture for 1936, his gaze is confident, even cocky. He is staring straight ahead, into the future.

But in the photograph for the academic year 1938–9 there was no sign of fourteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg. Everything had changed, including the shape of the country. After the Munich agreement of 1938, Adolf Hitler and his Hungarian allies had broken off chunks of Czechoslovakia, parcelling them out between them and, by the spring of 1939, what was left was sliced up. Slovakia announced itself as an independent republic. In reality it was a creature of the Third Reich, conceived with the blessing and protection of Berlin, which saw in the ruling ultra-nationalist Hlinka, or Slovak People’s Party, a mirror of itself. A day later the Nazis annexed and invaded the remaining Czech lands, marching in to declare a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Hungary seized one last chunk for itself. Once the carve-up was done, the people who lived in what used to be Czechoslovakia were all, to varying degrees, at the mercy of Adolf Hitler.

In Slovakia, the teenage Walter Rosenberg felt the difference immediately. He was told that, no matter the choice he had made for religious studies classes and the word he had put in the ‘nationality’ box on those forms, he met the legal definition of a Jew and was older than thirteen; therefore, his place at the Bratislava high school was no longer available. His education was terminated.

All across the country, Jews like Walter were coming to understand that although the new head of government was a Catholic priest – Father Jozef Tiso – the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination. The antisemites’ enduring creed held that Jews were not merely unreliable, untrustworthy and irreversibly foreign, but also endowed with almost supernatural powers, allowing them to wield social and economic influence out of all proportion to their numbers. So naturally the authorities in Bratislava moved fast to blame the country’s tiny Jewish community – 89,000 in a population of two and a half million – for the fate that had befallen the nation, including the loss of cherished territory to Hungary. Propaganda posters appeared, pasted on brick walls; one showed a proud young Slovak, clad in the black uniform of the Hlinka Guard, kicking the backside of a hook-nosed, side-curled Jew – the Jew’s purse of coins falling to the ground. In his first radio address as leader of the newly independent republic, Tiso made only one firm policy commitment: ‘to solve the Jewish question’.

After Walter’s expulsion from school, Ilona abandoned her work as a travelling saleswoman and the pair moved to Trnava, a small town thirty miles east of Bratislava. It was a shock after the capital: here all life, and multiple narrow lanes, converged on a central square named for the Holy Trinity and dominated by not one but two churches. In summer, Trnava was a cloud of heat and dust, the marketplace reeking of manure, hay and human sweat, the whole town overwhelmed with the stench emanating from the nearby sugar plant as it processed beet. Escape could be found in the countryside, with its flat fields of ripe corn and fresh breezes only a cycle ride away.

But if the Rosenbergs, mother and son, were hoping for refuge, they had come to the wrong place. The government’s determination to tackle the so-called Jewish question reached even here, touching small-town Trnava with its community of fewer than 3,000 Jews whose two synagogues stood a matter of yards apart. Not that the good people of Trnava needed much prompting: they had set fire to both synagogues a matter of weeks after Slovakia had gained its autonomy, in December 1938.

Walter soon joined up with a group of Jewish teenagers, who, like him, had been banished from the realm of learning. On the first day of term, the schools had hung signs on their gates announcing that Jews and Czechs were excluded, while their former friends chanted, ‘Jews out, Czechs out.’ After that, Walter and the other young Jews of Trnava, those in the eighth grade and above, were left to their own devices, wandering around town with no classes to attend and no place to be. Under the new rules, they were barred even from learning alone. Which is why Walter and his friend Erwin Eisler went one day to the local council building to hand in their textbooks, obeying an order introduced to guard against the threat of Jewish children studying in their own homes. Walter had complied dutifully, surrendering his books, but Erwin surprised him. Normally, Erwin was bashful, blushing at the mere mention of girls and ducking invitations to join the gang as they headed to a neighbourhood café. But on this day he showed unexpected pluck.

‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve still got that chemistry book.’

He had held on to one of the two volumes on inorganic and organic chemistry by the Czech scientist Emil Votoček. Thereafter Walter and Erwin would pore over that single text, teaching themselves in secret the knowledge their country was determined to deny them.

The self-teaching continued wherever the teenagers got together. Sometimes they gathered in a meadow known after its previous incarnation as ‘the pond’, sitting around, trying to make sense of the world that seemed to have turned upside down. Walter soon established himself as a dominant presence, his intelligence setting him apart. One girl, thirteen-year-old Gerta Sidonová, became steadily more enraptured by him, hanging on his every word. Her parents took him on as a personal tutor, though she doubtless found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. She hoped he considered her his girlfriend, though the signals could be mixed. One time, they had agreed to meet for a date but he stood her up. Afterwards, Gerta confronted him. He had gone to meet her, he told her. But as he approached he had seen that she was wearing a hat with pom-poms. That had prompted him to turn straight around and head in the opposite direction. She looked like a nine-year-old in that hat, he said. He was fifteen: he could not be seen with a child.

And yet the Jewish teenagers of Trnava had few options beyond each other. They, along with their families, were steadily excluded from the life of the town they had called home. It was the same story across the country. The Tiso regime was determined to impoverish and isolate Jews, first banning them from government jobs, then imposing a quota on the numbers allowed to work in the professions. Later Jews were banned from owning cars, radios or even sports equipment. Each new ordinance would be posted on a bulletin board in the centre of town: the Jews would check it every day, to see what new humiliation awaited them.

Walter and his mother had no assets to speak of, but those Jews who did were stripped of them, bit by bit: first their land was seized, then their businesses expropriated. Aryanisation, the authorities called it. Gerta’s father tried to keep his butcher shop alive by handing it over to an assistant who had been shrewd enough to join the Hlinka Party. They called that ‘voluntary Aryanisation’, by which Jewish-owned businesses would surrender a stake worth at least 51 per cent of the company to a ‘qualified Christian candidate’. The name of the programme was a stretch, because the Nazis did not regard the Slovaks as Aryans, but rather as a category of Slav. As such, they were firmly Untermenschen, an inferior people. Still, they were deemed superior to the Jews, and that was what mattered.

Beatings became commonplace, mainly of Jews but sometimes of those non-Jews who showed insufficient zeal in tormenting their Jewish neighbours. The national socialist paramilitaries pressured the people of Trnava and every other Slovak town or city to boycott Jewish businesses and Jews in general.

There was no hiding place, not even once your front door was closed and you were in your own home. From 1940, as Londoners were enduring the nightly air raids they would soon call the Blitz, Slovak gendarmes took the policy of expropriating Jewish property to a more direct, more literal level. They would enter Jewish homes and loot them, while the children could only stand and watch. They might grab a tennis racket or a coat, a camera or a treasured family heirloom or even, as in at least one case, a full-sized piano. Sometimes they would venture out of town, finding a Jewish-owned family farm and taking away the animals. It was open season. If a Jew had it, a Slovak could take it.

But the new republic had barely got started. As Walter turned seventeen, in September 1941, Tiso’s government introduced its own version of the Nuremberg laws, the Jewish Codex. Now, Jews were barred from public events, clubs and social organisations of any kind. They were allowed to venture out or shop only within prescribed hours. They could travel for only limited distances. If they wanted to buy property, they were subject to a 20 per cent surcharge: a Jew levy. There were limits on where they could live; they were to be confined to a few streets, an early step towards the ghetto. The headline on a pro-government news sheet bragged that, in the undeclared contest among fascist states, ‘The strictest laws against Jews are Slovakia’s’.

But the change which had the most immediate, most visible effect on Walter was also the crudest. From now on, any Jew in Slovakia over the age of six had to identify themselves by means of a yellow Star of David, six inches across

Reviews for The Escape Artist

[adrianburke_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Really good.

[stevesmits · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Oscar Schindler saved over 1,000 Jews from the camps as we all remember from Spielberg's film. He was lauded as a hero by Israel and deservedly so. Less well known is Rudi Vrba who can be credited with saving 200,000 Hungarian Jews. Vrba was an inmate at Auschwitz for nearly two years where he experienced and witnessed the horrors there. Through his various jobs at the camp Vrba deduced that its major purpose was the mass murder of 90% of those arriving on the constant trains into the camp. He calculated from the culling of the arrivals how many went straight to the gas chambers. He was determined to escape to tell the story to warn the world about what was happening. He and another inmate made a daring escape, something almost unprecedented at the camp. After a perilous trek, he and his partner reached their homeland of Slovakia where they reported in great detail what was happening there. Vrba had learned that the next wave of deportations was to be Hungarian Jews and his intent was to make this known so that resistance might thwart the plan.Vrba entrusted his report to leaders of the Jewish council with the expectation that they would issue a public warning. To his great frustration, the report produced very little action in this regard. Copies finally made their way to the press and to Allied wartime leaders who likewise for various reasons, some shallow and wrong-headed, did not take action. Finally, the Hungarian regime made some effort to stop the Nazi's plans which did spare 200,000 Budapest Jews from the trains but did not stop the roundups in the countryside.Unlike Schindler, Vrba later received scant postwar recognition of his endeavor to warn of the impending extermination of Jews. This was largely because he publicly criticized for failure to take action the leader of the Jewish Council, a man who had been already declared a hero in Israel. He remained throughout his life very angry and bitter that others did not act on his report.The book touches on the failures of Allied leaders to implement readily available measures to stop or slow down the heinous work of the extermination camps. Such measures as bombing the railways leading to the camps were not utilized. These failures are thoroughly told in book of several years ago "The Abandonment of the Jews". One aspect of this inaction was certainly the thread of antisemitism pervasive at many levels of government.Vrba's descriptions of life in the camp are tough to read. One again grapples with the question of how in a nation noted for cultural and intellectual achievements such a horrific plan was implemented. I do think that in every society (even in 21st century America) there is a current of hatred and violence running close to the surface that only needs a spark of demagoguery to unleash it. Let us not think that the antisemitism of the 20th century is a thing of the past.

[almin-70827 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really dislike the title and cover for this book...it seems frivolous and this book is anything but....Rudi's obsession with the failure of the Verba-Wetzler Report to warn the Hungarian Jews of their imminent death, at the hands of the Nazis, is explored towards the end of the book. I found the theories by several prominent historians interesting and strangely believable. Humans, when confronted with their own death can be in denial and refuse to believe the evidence presented. Highly recommend....

[addunn3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A well-written history of life and death in German death camps and one man's escape from them.